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Thursday, April 09, 2009

I am a Dummy

Way back when I started this blog just under 4 years ago I wrote a post called 'An Oracle Developers Journey', in the early days the blog focused on the transition from Oracle to MySQL. The irony was that after a year or so professionally I move back the other way and for the last 3 years or so it's been all Oracle for me.

We all make mistakes, I know I have made some massive ones in the past, some were saved by a decent back up others were not so easy to recover from. It's been a while since I made anything like a big mistake (certainly not one that was noticed ;), once bitten twice shy tends to make you think about the consequences a little more.

But having now switched back to MySQL again I find myself really worried I'm going to make a mistake, in Oracle it's UPDATE/INSERT or more worryingly DELETE and then a COMMIT, but in MySQL (at least the way we are running it) there is no commit stage. I'm currently working on development systems but I just know that one day I'm going to delete or update something I really don't want to.

Thankfully MySQL is clever enough to make up for my itchy delete finger and includes the --safe-updates startup option. But I love the alias which is --i-am-a-dummy. I'm man enough to admit to being a dummy, well at least prone to doing something dum from time to time and that's why the first thing I did when I switched back to MySQL was to include --i-am-a-dummy in my startup alias.

So hands up who else is a dummy?

p.s. if you don't know --safe-updates sets the following session system variables.

SET sql_safe_updates=1,
sql_select_limit=1000,
sql_max_join_size=1000000;

sql_safe_updates is the key as it stops you running an update or delete without some sort of where clause.

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